I’ll never forget the day I went to my best friend’s house after school and she said, “So there’s this thing called Riot Grrrl?”
I was 13 then and lucky to catch the tail end of Bikini Kill’s career and the beginning of Sleater-Kinney’s. Sleater-Kinney helped me define myself as a feminist rocker, and was a huge inspiration when I formed my first band, which, like Sleater-Kinney, was a three-piece, all-girl band.
And so over the summer, when the indie music press has been abuzz with word that the eminent all-woman punk band has broken up, I was kind of upset.
The band announced in late June that it had “decided to go on an indefinite hiatus”-a phrasing bands commonly use to soften the post break-up blow.
The news didn’t come as a huge surprise.
Sleater-Kinney had a strong 11-year run after forming in 1995 from the ashes of two important Olympia Riot Grrrl bands-and apparently had to see a band therapist to keep it together for the last few years.
The break-up is a major blow to the indie music scene and particularly to the sparse remains of the early ’90s Riot Grrrl movement.
Though Riot Grrrl arguably died with the break-up of Bikini Kill in 1996, Sleater-Kinney kept the feminist, rock ‘n’ roll ideals of the movement alive all these years. Riot Grrrl helped define a generation of girl punk rockers, and I can’t imagine my life without it, or without Sleater-Kinney.
Riot Grrrl’s early years were filled with a lot of angry feminist “manifestas” and a sense of urgency to voice young women’s concerns that shattered the glass ceiling of punk rock. But like many intense political-music movements, Riot Grrrl was too volatile to sustain itself for more than a few years and fizzled out in the mid-90s.
With Sleater-Kinney, Riot Grrrl matured as it started singing less about the outrage of being left out of the male-dominated punk scene-and male-dominated world, for that matter-and started expressing more about day-to-day concerns with consumerism, marriage, motherhood and fears of losing sight of their Riot Grrrl roots.
Sleater-Kinney’s more grown-up outlook on Riot Grrrl appealed to me when I was a little older because I found the super-angriness of earlier Riot Grrrl bands quickly became tiring. However, I didn’t get to see Sleater-Kinney live until May 2004 because it refused to play in Salt Lake City after an argument with a certain club owner-I won’t get into that.
So by the time I finally saw the band a couple years ago, its members were bona fide rock stars. It was at the Fillmore in San Francisco, and I was so excited I climbed on stage and danced around while they jammed in between songs. I was about to get carried off by a surly looking security guard when one of the guitarists, Carrie Brownstein, saw what was happening, then turned to me and mouthed, “Get down!”
